Not only is the average man today an older and graver creature
than his ancestor of three centuries ago, but he is very differently employed. There has
been a great diversion in his interest from the primary necessities of life.

Three centuries ago, well over ninety per cent of the human population
was absorbed either in the direct production of necessities or the scramble to get them
from their original producers. Direct producers, the peasants and toilers, the
entrepreneurs and their managers and directors, and direct distributors accounted for
upward of eighty percent of the human total; the rest were the millions of interveners,
usurers, claim-makers, landowners, rentiers, solicitors, speculators, parasites, robbers
and thieves who were deemed necessary to ginger up the economic process. The forces
of law, order and education, excluding temporary conscription and levies for military
ends, took up five or six percent of the residue, and a small minority, something under
five per cent of the total population, supplied all the artistic effort, the scientific
inquiry, the social and political thought, the living soul of the entire social body.

The systems of interest of most people were therefore restricted almost
entirely to work and the struggle to possess. They had to think continually of the
work they did either for their own profit or for the personal profit, comfort or fantasy
of some employer. They had to think of keeping their jobs or of getting fresh ones,
and this, in the days of narrowing employment after the Hoover Slump, became at last a
monstrous obsession of the brain. What they earned they had to spend carefully or guard
carefully, for the rascaldom of business was everywhere seeking to give nothing for
something. Sometimes, sick of their narrow lives, they would gamble in the desperate hope
of a convulsive enlargement, and for most of them gambling meant disappointment and self-
reproach. Add to these worries a little love, a good deal of hate, and the desperate
struggle to see it all in a hopeful and honourable light, a desperate hunger to be
flattered and reassured, and you of have the content of ninety-nine per cent of the human
brains that made the world of 1930. They could no more escape from this restricted circle
of urgently clamorous interests, hardly ampler than the circle of an animal's interests,
than the animals can.

The modern state has broken this cramping circle of interests for every
human being. We are still creatures with brains like our forefathers, corresponding
ganglia to ganglia and fibre to fibre, but we are not using those brains for the same
purpose. The modern state, by ensuring plenty and controlling the increase of population,
has taken all the interests of the food-hunt and the food-scramble, and all the interests
of the struggle to down-and-out our human competitors, away from the activities of the
individual brain. A relatively small number of specialised workers keep the necessary
controls of these primary preoccupations going. We worry about food, drink, clothing,
health and personal freedom no more. The work we must do it is not burthensome in amount,
and it is the most congenial our educational guardians can find for us and helped us to
find. When it is done we are sure of the result; nobody is left in the world to cheat us
or rob us of our pay. We are still competitive, more so perhaps than ever; jealousy still
wars with generosity in us; the story of our personal affectations is rarely a simple
story; but the interest we feel in our work is a masterful interest and not a driven
interest, and the competition is for distinction, appreciation and self- approval and not
for mutual injury. There has been a release of by far the moiety of the mental energy of
the normal man from its former inescapable preoccupations.

This steady obliteration of primary motives is manifested most
illuminatingly by the statistics of what used to be "crime and punishment",
figures of the offences, insubordinations and deliberate outages upon social order and the
consequent punishment and corrective proceedings that are issued by the disciplinary
organisation of behaviour control. Statistics for the years of decadence are not
forthcoming, but there is plenty for material from the comparatively orderly and
prosperous period between 1890 and 1930. Great Britain then constituted the healthiest and
most law-abiding community in the world, but the figures that emerge to the student of
history present what seems to be an appalling welter of crime. Stealing, cheating of every
sort, forgery, burglary, robbery with violence, poisoning and other forms of murder,
occurred daily. It did not seem as though that thick defilement of wrongdoing about
property could ever cease. Innumerable suicides occurred through pecuniary worry. Yet now
all these crimes which filled the jails, arising out of the scramble for money and
property in an age of insufficiency, are almost completely vanished from human life. The
Behaviour Control Report for 2104 (2105 is not yet available) record 715 cases of stealing
for the whole world. In nearly every case, the objects stolen was some personal work of
art, some small jewel, a piece of embroidery, a pet animal, several children, and - in one
instance - the bulb of a new variety of lily that aroused the instinct to possess and care
for. It is doubtful whether there were many undetected or unreported thefts.

They has not, however been anything like this in abolition of personal
offences. They have diminished. But while the property offences have diminished to the
scale of one ten-millionth of the old world figures, these others show a reduction in the
nature of single instances to former hundreds. Many types in our population are still very
easily turn towards sexual lawlessness. Beautiful and attractive people and, particularly,
attractive children are not yet perfectly immune from undesired solicitation, personal
persecution, annoying assault and resentful injury. Jealousy is still a dangerous passion,
more particularly below the age of forty. The Behaviour Control ascribes nearly 520,000
offences to this group of urgencies, mostly assaults of varying degree of malignity,
culminating in 67 murders. They were also 2192 suicides in the total. These figures show
only a slight improvement upon the annual average for the previous decade.

Another difficult class of offence, which finds no exact parallel in the
criminal statistics of former times, unless the British offence of "malignant
mischief" is to be put in this group, are acts of annoyance, destruction, assault and
so forth, due to competitive jealousy and the exasperation aroused, often quite
unwittingly, by the bearing or achievements of one's fellow creatures. This sort of
misbehaviour varies in degree from the black hatred and fury of an uncontrolled egotism to
what verges in some cases upon justifiable criticism of slightly fatuous self-complacent
behaviour. Four murders, some hundreds of assaults and acts of wanton destruction in this
category witness to the fact that the world is still not a paradise for every type of
individual. Either they are bitter by some inner necessity or they have been embittered.
Yet when we take the grand total of every misdeed that had to be dealt with last year,
counting even the most petty occasions for restoration, warning or reproof, and find it is
just three quarters of a million in a world of 2,500 million people, we have a
quantitative measure of human progress in three centuries that justifies a very stalwart
confidence in the human outlook. The imagination of man's heart is no longer evil
continually. It is only evil occasionally, and the practical task of our social
psychologists is to reduce those occasions and provocations.

The abundant release of brain-stuff, the mental plenty which has
resulted from the organisation of material plenty, is of necessity being directed into the
into new channels. That meagre half per cent or less of creative workers in the old
regime, the few curious men who played about with novel ideas, the odd men of leisure who
collected rarities and inventions, has grown into a mighty body of inquiry, experiment,
verification and record which is becoming now the larger part of the world's population.

We know now with certainly what the people of three centuries ago never
suspected, that the human brain released from hunger, fear and the other primary stresses
is very easily amenable not the only to creative and directive desire but also to kindly
and helpful impulses. Almost all the people who keep our productive, our distributing and
transport services going are there because they find the work entertaining, because they
like making the machine work well and helping people. There is satisfaction in being able
to do things skilfully for others that they could not do nearly so well for themselves.
The barbers, shoe-makers, tailors, dress-makers, hatters, outfitters and so forth in the
great stores today are very different people from the rather obsequious, deferential
"inferiors" who made our great-great-grandfathers presentable to the world.
Their essential interest is to make their customers sightly and comfortable, but not to
turn a profit for an employer. The old literature wreaks with contempt for barbers and
tailors and cobblers, often the contempt of profound resentment. If the common man
despised the cobbler, the cobbler pinched his toe and chafed his heel. The barber, it
seemed, did no more than cut hair rather badly, and the tailor cut clothes. Except by
accident, the barber had ceased to be a barber-surgeon. But nowadays the old-world barber
will scarcely recognise himself in the barber-dentist, the kindly expert who sees to our
coiffure, gives attention to our teeth, scrutinises our mouth, hair and skin to detect any
evidence of failing health, and sends us on our way refreshed, encouraged and warmed.
Often his friend the tailor or dress-maker will call while he deals with us to consider
our general bravery and improvement, and suggest variations of our exercise and habits.

The old distributing trades have lost their sharp demarcation from the
advisory professions. They are in touch with the guardians of development who have
replaced the schoolmasters, nurses, governesses, tutors and so forth of the old time, and
with the general advisors who have taken on the task of family solicitor, religious
minister, private confessor and general practitioner of the past. These advisory and
directive professions probably number two or three times as big a proportion of the whole
population as the lawyers, educationalists and doctors of the 19th century. They merge
again into another stratum, the specialist teachers, concerned with developing and passing
skills and building up and maintaining the common ideology. This class again passes by
insensible degrees in to the worlds of technical work, art, literature and scientific
research.

The primary producers and elaborators of material, or agriculturalists,
engineers, chemists, transport men and industrial directors, also do their work because
they like doing it. It satisfies them. They like their materials, they like their
difficulties, they like the order of their days. In spite of an increasing output per head
of population and the increasing variety and elaboration of the things we use, socially or
individually, the numerical proportion of this section of the human population does not
increase. Efficiency still outruns need and desire. The two and a half years of compulsory
public service, which is an integral part of our education, supplies a larger and larger
proportion of such toil as is still unavoidable.

The release of human energy from primary needs is a process that seems
likely to continue indefinitely. And all the forces that have made our worldwide social
life and keep it going direct the released energy towards the achievement of fresh
knowledge and the accumulation and rendering of fresh experience. There is a continual
sublimation of interest. Man becomes more curious, more excited, more daring, skilful, and
pleasantly occupied every year. The more we learn of the possibilities of our world and
the possibilities of ourselves, the richer, we learn, is our inheritance. This planet,
which seemed so stern a mother to mankind, is discovered to be it inexhaustible in its
bounty. And the greatest discovery man has made it has been the discovery of himself.
Lionardo da Vinci, with his immense breadth of vision, his creative fervour, his
curiosity, his power of intensive work, was the precursor of the ordinary man, as the
world is now producing.